by Uncle Alan
I’ve long held that real SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about quality. Quality information real people want to read, not information created around an intentional set of keywords that honestly match what real people would enter to find what you’ve put together for them. Genuine back links from other real sites who like what you publish and want to tell their visitors about you or feature what your work.
Not a bunch of fake Websites pointing at your site.
Now Google has once again swept all the attempts to manufacture rankings under the rug, changing their search ranking algorithm completely – again.
Sadly, they did it for all the wrong reasons, but the effect is the same.
What Google’s done is to blend photos, comments and news posted on their Google+ social network into the search results you now see when you type in a search. According to a quote in the Los Angeles Times, Google Fellow Amit Singhal said the idea is to make you the center of your search experience.
I disagree. I think it’s more an attempt on Google’s part to force more people to use its Google+ social network, which is in direct competition with Facebook. Google+ has grown astonishingly fast, but it’s still a far cry from Facebook’s 800+ million users.
Google is a multi-billion dollar success story, but they’ve experienced failure competing with YouTube. They finally had to buy the company.
Google’s first experiment with social networking, tied to gmail, was a dismal failure, too.
Today, Facebook has the user base and money to eventually make search more relevant and Google’s not about to stand by and let it happen, so they launched Google+. They know they can’t buy Facebook, so they’ve decided to tie their search results directly to Google+, forcing anyone who wants to be seen to participate in their social network or risk simply sliding to the back pages.
Any attempt at SEO "magic" is constantly going to be undone...get over it.
What we’re seeing right now is an all-out war between Google and Facebook. Google’s search results — and anyone who thought they had SEO “figured out” — are the apparent victims.
You might remember, I predicted here a while ago that Facebook was on track to turn its social network into a search engine built around what people actually like most, not algorithms that assume what is most relevant to the terms you’re searching on.
Google claims it wants to include more Facebook information in its new search results, but the company isn’t allowed by Facebook to access to the information they need – even though Microsoft’s Bing worked out a deal with Facebook to do something like this with their search engine.
Twitter Inc., in a public statement released Tuesday, January 10 (the day Google turned this feature on), mirrored my concerns: “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the Internet,” Twitter spokesman Matt Graves said. “We’re concerned that as, a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone.”
Google points out that people can elect NOT to see the new search results by clicking an icon on the site…but I seriously doubt most people who use Google will know this or bother. Most never go past page one looking for results — why would they be aware of this option and use it, either?
I’m certain there are new ways to get “around” this latest change. But, you know as well as I do that part of that equation is going to involve setting up shop on Google+, whether you want to or not.
The writing’s clearly on the wall. ANY “fix” you try to implement will only be undone, sooner or later. A far better tactic would be to aim what you do at Google’s ultimate goal – besides bringing Facebook to its knees, which ain’t gonna’ happen: provide quality information that is truly useful to human beings searching on your topic and over-delivering on anything you offer to sell to the audience you’re building.
